1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to a reader for a smart credit card, and more particularly to a reader for various different types of smart credit cards.
2. Discussion of the Background
The term IC card is used to denote cards, generally with the size of a credit card, but alternatively tokens, which are provided with an electronic microcircuit based on memories and a microcontroller designed to make it possible to perform a transaction, for example a financial or medical transaction.
Known IC card readers are provided with a system which provides a link with an IC card, either by means of a multipin electrical connector, or by means of a capacitive or inductive antenna. They are essentially of two types: either self-contained or transparent.
Self-contained IC card readers are ones which work on their own. They have communication elements which are sufficient to allow an individual to monitor and understand the performance of a transaction: keyboard and display which, like the link to the IC card, are managed by the reader's own microcontroller which has a program specific to the transaction in question.
Transparent IC card readers are used for the IC card to access a computer system programmed especially for the transaction in question. For the computer system, they behave as a simple input/output port especially designed for an IC card.
These self-contained or transparent IC card readers use the IC card as a secured-data medium or for the security or encryption functions which it can offer. In all cases, they transmit instructions to the IC card which are set in a form which accords with a specific exchange protocol, often the one defined in standard ISO 7816-3, and manage the response from this card, which they process themselves if they are self-contained, or return to the computer system to which they are connected, if they are transparent.
The intelligence of the transaction therefore lies either in the reader or in the computer system associated with the reader. The drawback of this is the need for specialization of the reader, or the associated computer system, according to the type of transaction. Thus, if the type of transaction needs to be changed, it is not enough to change the programming of the IC card. It is also necessary to change the programming of the reader, if it is self-contained, or the programming of the associated computer system, if the reader is a transparent one. This constitutes an obstacle to the development of IC card applications.
To overcome this drawback, it has been proposed to shift the intelligence, that is to say the management of the transaction, to the IC card itself. However, this is not sufficient if the intention is to keep IC cards compatible with current specialized readers. These IC cards will in fact need to accept the current data exchange protocol. One approach is to provide a plurality of data exchange protocols, but this increases the complexity of the tasks which the smart IC card has to perform, even though its capacity is inherently limited.